What Happened to the European Union?

William Drozdiak's new book charts the tensions that have divided a continent.

January 8, 2018

The
European Union defies historical analogy. It is not an empire, and Brussels is
anything but an imperial capital. It commands no army, houses no single leader,
projects no one culture outward from metropole to province. Still less is the
EU a republic with an obvious bond of connection between state and citizen,
though it is composed of many individual republics. Nor is the EU is a
confederation, a Hanseatic or a Delian league redux. The EU is much more than a
confederation of sovereign states. It is itself a state with a flag and a
parliament and a currency. A state with a past, the EU has been decades in the
making. But whatever the European Union may be in practice, it is a theoretical
novelty.

By
2003, when ten new countries began the process of joining the EU, it was a flourishing
novelty. Its very existence symbolized the overcoming of centuries-long
conflict between France and Germany. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,
it drew a range of post-Soviet countries into its orbit of law, cooperation and
affluence. Such was the appeal of the EU in 2003 that the world around it
seemed to be becoming “European” in hopes of membership or of partnership or at
least of proximity. Czech Republic, Estonia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania,
Hungary, Malta, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia became member states in 2004. Turkey,
Georgia and Ukraine debated the possibility of joining the club in one way or
another. Brussels welcomed and enjoyed the debate.

In
his new book, Fractured Continent:
Europe’s Crises and the Fate of the West, the distinguished journalist
William Drozdiak quotes from the EU’s first security strategy paper, which was
released in 2003. “Europe has never been so prosperous, so secure nor so free,”
the paper declared. “The violence of the first half of the twentieth century
has given way to a period of peace and stability unprecedented in European
history.” In the winter of 2018 these pronouncements read more like an epitaph
for a bygone golden age. Fractured
Continent traces the path from 2003 to 2017. How, Drozdiak asks, did we get
from there to here?

The
1957 Treaty of Rome, signed by Belgium, France, Italy, Luxemburg, the
Netherlands and West Germany, created the EU’s predecessor, the European
Economic Community. The European Parliament began holding meetings in 1958; the
first direct elections were held in 1979. The impulse to European integration
in these years was predominantly economic, and economic integration made
Western Europe a synonym for wealth. Despite terrifying Cold War tensions, the
division of Europe into East and West with American troops stationed across
Western Europe settled the question of European security. The United States was
not always beloved by Western Europeans, but it had an urgent strategic purpose
within this bounded Europe. When Americans and Western Europeans disagreed
about this purpose, the Soviet threat kept them in line.

With
the end of the Cold War, the European Union took on a new purpose: instead of
serving as a bulwark of Western liberalism, it became a means of expanding the
boundaries of the West. The Maastricht treaty of 1992 combined security and
economic integration, while the 1995 Schengen Agreement enabled free movement
across the borders of many EU member states. The Euro was introduced in 1999. Countries
sacrificed a degree of sovereignty for the sake of participating in the
European project, the benefits of which seemed to be self-evident. Nationalist
conflict was to be exchanged for European integration, parochialism for
cosmopolitanism, circumscribed markets for open markets.

FRACTURED CONTINENT: EUROPE’S CRISES AND THE FATE OF THE WEST by William DrozdiakW. W. Norton & Company, 311 pp., $26.95

Europe’s
string of organizational achievements appeared to be a microcosm of “the
liberal international order of open markets, free speech, and democratic elections.”
The United States had pushed for European integration, and from 1991 to 2016
the United States and the EU partnered in the extension of a liberal
international order to parts of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.
This was an attempt to establish certain rules of international cooperation, a
mixture of free trade and the peaceful resolution of conflicts, embedded in
multi-lateral institutions. It was to be a genuinely global order. In 2013,
President Obama announced TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership. Drozdiak defines it as an initiative “designed to reaffirm western
leadership of the global economy and to allow the West to set future standards
for the rest of the world.”

TTIP
fell on dark days with Donald Trump’s election in 2016. (Unlike the
Trans-Pacific Partnership, TTIP has not yet been formally unwound by the Trump
administration.) The EU had been traumatized only a few months before by
Britain’s decision to leave the union. These events are at the center of Drozdiak’s
anatomy of fracture. Europe has found itself with serious internal woes: In the
South there has unfolded “the worst crisis of youth unemployment in the postwar
history of Europe”; in Central Europe, “a new brand of nationalism” has emerged,
arrayed against Brussels in Central Europe; and Chancellor Merkel’s decision to
welcome hundreds of thousands of migrants into Germany and therefore into the
EU has caused widespread discontent.

Europe’s
foreign-policy problems are, if anything, more severe. “Today, Europe’s
neighborhood policy stands in ruins,” Drozdiak points out, with Russia a
hostile and revisionist power, Turkey a semi-dictatorship, and zones of chaos
and war to Europe’s south and east. Just as the threats are proliferating, Europe
is losing the guarantee of unequivocal American support. President Trump openly
admires Putin and Erdogan, while his interactions with Theresa May and Angela Merkel
have been awkward and strained. With its withdrawal from the Paris climate
accords, its uncertain commitment to NATO’s obligation to mutual defense and
its discontents with the Iran nuclear deal, Trump’s Washington has been a shaky
sponsor of the liberal international order. After Trump’s election, Joschka
Fischer, Germany’s former Foreign Minister, declared that “the Western world as
virtually everyone alive today has known it will almost certainly perish before
our eyes.” He may not be wrong.

Drozdiak
offers only one wide-ranging reason for the slide from certainty and strength
in 2003 to Joschka Fischer’s intuition of a perishing West. It is economic. The
2008 financial crisis “exacted a huge toll in public support for Europe,” causing
a power vacuum across the EU. It exacerbated class and urban-rural divisions,
enhancing the perception of elites as the beneficiaries of the EU and
non-elites as its victims. It boosted youth unemployment, especially in
Southern Europe, and it underscored the perils of globalization. Greece
has suffered most acutely from all of these trends. It is ruled by Europe
without truly being of Europe, “a sort of protectorate of the Western world,
with the surface trappings of a sovereign state but under the close and
relentless supervision of foreign creditors.”

Elsewhere,
for reasons that are only partly economic, populism has been widening its reach.
Erdogan’s founding of the AK party in 2001 was an early warning; only a year
before, Vladimir Putin had come to power in Russia. The bell was tolling for the
liberal international order, presaging the search for more traditional notions of
nation, religion and gender, coupled with nostalgia for a time of greater
ethnic homogeneity. Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski
would ride these sentiments to power. So too would the Brexiteers. There is not
a Western European country by now that does not have an active populist party.

“The
fate of Europe will be decided largely in Berlin,” Drozdiak writes, and even
Berlin is starting to partake of the European and transatlantic disorder. Although
Drozdiak’s book does not cover Germany’s recent elections, the country’s third
biggest party at the moment is the AFD, a German acronym that stands for
“alternative for Germany.” The AFD has weakened Chancellor Merkel’s coalition
to the extent that she is struggling to form a government.

More
palpable than an explanation of Europe’s disorder, in Fractured Continent, is Drozdiak’s moral attitude toward this
disorder. His is the attitude of many journalists and foreign-policy experts in
the transatlantic realm who feel that what is happening should not be
happening. Chancellor Merkel is the agent of what should be happening. A beacon
of the liberal international order, she is the book’s hero. Her Germany betrays
signs of “dominant, almost monopolistic control over European policies,” but it
is a control wielded for and not against Europe. Emmanuel Macron exhibits a
needed vitality. When he beat back Marine LePen’s populist hoards, “virtually
all of Europe breathed a sigh of relief,” Drozdiak believes. If virtually all
of Europe was rooting for the pro-Europe Macron, one wonders why there has been
a problem with populism to begin with, why there are not Macrons in all of
Europe’s capitals.

An
offhand comment about Brexit best illustrates the solipsism of Drozdiak’s identification
with the EU and of his disgust with its enemies. He notes that “the British
vote to bolt the EU had taken everybody by surprise”—not virtually everyone in
this instance but literally everybody. Oddly enough, however, Trump was not
unsurprised by Brexit when it happened. He was in favor of it. Nor did Trump’s
possibly eccentric zeal for Brexit cause American voters to abandon him in a
fit of Europhilic pique. The American electorate took both Brexit and the
Republican candidate’s excitement about it in stride.

The inevitable Europe of 1989 and 2003 has been betrayed by
some amorphous spirit of narrowness, opportunism and malice.

Drozdiak’s
morality play of populism at war with Europe or of Europe turning in upon
itself is a story of Europe interrupted. Yet again the lights are going out across
Europe. Strange problems are overtaking an intrinsically admirable project. Iron-clad
alliances that were once iron-clad and self-evident are faltering. Novel enemies
have appeared on the horizon, which is to say political parties whose cause is
the destruction of the European Union, the questioning of the alliance with the
United States, and the reconsideration of the poisoned relationship between
Russia and the EU. The inevitable Europe of 1989 and 2003 has been betrayed by
some amorphous spirit of narrowness, opportunism and malice. This spirit,
abetted by hard economic times, is translating success into failure. The
enemies are at the gates; a handful of them are inside the gates.

As
literature, Drozdiak’s morality play has much to recommend it. A proper tragedy,
it gives an emotional arc to events that have stubbornly defied prediction. On
the other hand, supporters of the European Union and of the transatlantic
relationship are not in need of any more morality plays. They have been
indulging in them since Brexit. The renewal of the European project can only
come from cogent, hard-headed analysis.

Such
analysis might begin by examining the precarious nature of an ever-expanding
European project. When the EU recast itself in the 1990s, the United States was
an uncontested superpower. Twentieth-century Russia had been a dynamic part of
the European state system for centuries, assertive toward any interest that concerned
its borders. Its absence from the European state system in the 1990s was
destined to be temporary. In 2014, Russia asserted itself once again as an
actor in the European state system, when it moved to prevent Ukraine’s
absorption into the EU. Russia’s actions were intolerable to the EU, which
joined the U.S. in sanctioning Russia, making Russia and the EU parties to a
destabilizing conflict.

Ongoing
disorder in the Middle East has compounded the EU’s security dilemma. The EU’s
vaunted soft power is useless against Putin’s Russia, and it has been
irrelevant in the Syrian civil war. Conflict in Syria has sent hundreds of
thousands of migrants in the direction of Europe, as has chaos in North Africa.
Disorder in the Middle East is more acutely a European than an American problem:
Islamist terrorism flows more easily into the EU than it does into the United
States. Since 2015, Russia has shown itself to be a more consequential actor in Syria than the pacifist EU. Russia
has succeeded in propping up Assad and has been trying since January 2017 to supplant
the “Geneva” diplomatic process for a post-war settlement in Syria, in which
the West is involved, with the “Astana” process, in which the West is not
involved.

Europe’s
economic tribulations run north-south rather than east-west. It has proven
difficult to manage a single currency shared by diverse national economies, not
all of which are well aligned with one another. In particular, Germany’s taste
for austerity at home and across Europe, augmented by the advantages that have
accrued to German exports from the Euro, has exposed a rift between a
prospering north and a suffering south. Most likely, the German electorate
would not tolerate a departure from austerity, and German workers do a great
deal to fund the EU. At the same time, southern Europe’s economic misery has
created the perception of German indifference or worse. This perception sharpened
when in September 2015, as Drozdiak writes, “Merkel did not bother consulting
with other EU leaders before deciding to fling open Germany’s doors” to
migrants.

Culture
is Europe’s third fault line. The European project today does not have a solid
cultural foundation. In a pattern familiar from American politics, more
educated and cosmopolitan Europeans tend to favor the EU, while populist and
other assaults on the EU rise up from rural and economically depressed areas.
The EU has a long record of faring badly when national populations vote on its
policies in referenda. A decade before Brexit, French and Dutch voters rejected
an EU constitution, demonstrating the limits of popular support for greater European
integration. Nothing quite captures the EU’s popularity deficit than the superbly
cynical quote from Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission:
“We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve
done it.” Put differently, Juncker and his colleagues really do not know what
to do.

Europe’s
challenges are not intractable. They could be resolved by the EU’s evolution
into a republic, with well-defined borders, an army and a top-down capacity to
balance the economic disparities that have made Germany so skeptical of Greece
and Greece so skeptical of Germany. This republic could inculcate a republican identity
in order to be buoyed by a shared and singular political culture. Or Europe’s
challenges could be resolved by reducing the EU to a confederation, which is
what the European project was in the 1950s. This would be painful. It would involve
untangling bureaucracies that have long been joined. But countries that have
reclaimed more of their sovereignty may be better at cooperating on core issues
of security and economics, without requiring the cultural homogeneity to which
Europe has never been prone.

Since
2003, what Drozdiak describes as “the world’s first postmodern superpower” has
come down to earth. In the future, it will be less postmodern, less
historically anomalous, less of a theoretical novelty and more like a
traditional confederation or a traditional republic. By moving closer together
or further apart, the countries of Europe will hopefully achieve a more lasting
union. To do so would be to heal the fractures that currently scar the continent.